Homo Sovieticus versus Homo Sexualis

Homosexuality and bourgeois decadence: Reflections on the Orlando Massacre – Part two of a five part series.

Soviet psychologist Igor Kon once remarked that American and Soviet right-wing views of homosexuality were similar. The former saw homosexuality as a communist plot against ‘the free world’ while the latter viewed it as a capitalist conspiracy against the proletariat. Kon was to a certain extent correct. But he failed to point out that, far from being right-wing, the communist view of homosexuality was the attitude that prevailed in the USSR when the proletariat and the peasantry dictated the country’s polices through the soviets, while the ‘left-wing’ communist plot was not a communist plot at all. Communists never recognised a condition called homosexuality. It was promoted, however, by Trotskyites, anarchists and other petit-bourgeois, leftist theorists of pseudo-Marxism.

In the Soviet Union homosexuality was seen as one of the many perversions promoted by the bourgeoisie and their petty-bourgeois opponents– a ruling class phenomenon of social rather than biological origin. The communist understanding of sexuality has, since the counter-revolutions in Europe in 1989 and the dissolution of the USSR, been conveniently buried and forgotten. This series of articles will defend the correctness of the communist view that sexual perversion and class domination are inextricably linked and that communists should not only critique uranian liberation but oppose it.

For readers who are new to the subject and want an insight into how democracy worked in the USSR, I recommend the book ‘Soviet Democracy’ by Pat Sloan, a British economist who lived and worked in the Soviet Union during the Stalin era. There are few communists today would defend the Soviet and former Cuban views of human sexuality. That is because most communists still bear traces of bourgeois attitudes to sex and social behaviour. As French philosopher Michel Foucault pointed out, everything is political, including sex. I agree with this view, but for different reasons.

‘Turning Filth into Theory’

Frederich Engels was a smart man. He learned 16 languages and was an omnivorous reader. In his lifestyle, Engels was somewhat of a bourgeois bohemian. But he was also a scientific socialist. He worked hard but partied hard too.He lived with an Irish woman but never married. His attitudes to sex and morality were by no means typical of the prudish and repressed Victorian age. Engels once received a book from Karl Marx. It was a copy of homosexualist Karl Heinrich Ulrichs ‘Forschungen über das Rätsel der mannmännlichen Liebe- research on the puzzle of male homosexual love.

Engels wrote a letter to Marx expressing his thoughts on Ulrichs’ research. He dismissed the book as an attempt to ‘turn filth(Schweinerei) into theory’. The German philosopher described the contents of the book as ‘extremely unnatural revelations’ (äußerst widernatürliche Enthüllungen). Engels believed that homosexuality and pederasty were the same. He claimed that homosexualists and pederasts had infiltrated the state and were pushing for the legalisation of their lifestyles. He warned Marx that once that would happen the new political slogan would be ‘guerre aux cons, paix aux trous-de-cul- war on fools, peace for bumfuckers’. Engels was clearly against the legalisation of homosexuality and predicted that it would spread decadence throughout Germany.

By the 1920s, Berlin, raped by foreign banks under the Treaty of Versailles, had become a cesspool of prostitution, drugs and sexual perversion.

Marx was no more flattering of homosexuals than Engels. Johann Baptist Schweitzer, an urning and follower of the social democrat Ferdinand Lassalle tried to persuade Marx to support Lassalle’s opportunistic, reformist movement. Marx described Schweitzer as a ‘warm brother’- a derogatory epithet for a homosexual man.

Many right-wing anti-communists like to claim that decadence thrived in Berlin when the communist party was hegemonic. That is a lie. Decadence thrived under social democracy. The German communist Party(KPD) followed the Marxist line on sexuality. It was the refusal of social democrats to join forces with the communists which enabled the Nazis to seize power in 1933. Social democrats are and always have been class traitors.

In his book ‘The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State’ Engels argued that Ancient Greek pederasty and homosexuality were the consequences of the male oppression of women. We still live in a society what oppresses women. Most women cannot afford the luxury of spending time with their children, as they have to work outside the home. Many women are penalised and harassed by corporations when they apply for maternity leave. Women’s liberation is a myth. No one is really free under capitalism. The stress and anxiety generated by such an inhumane system are leading to the warping of human emotional and intellectual development on a scale never seen before.

A Letter to the Stalin Society

The Stalin Society of North America have done an important service to the public in defending the life and works of Joseph Stalin against the mountains of lies diffused by soviet revisionists and Sovietologists such as Robert Conquest and Timothy Snyder,but they are undermining the cause of communism in criticising soviet policy on sexuality by citing the work of the child rapist and fraud Alfred Kinsey.

The note on their website on this issue is misleading and anti-Marxist. Referring to the American Psychiatric Association’s declassification of homosexuality as a mental disorder, the Stalin Society of North America writes:

‘To expect that Stalin, and Soviet Russia in the 1930s, would foresee the advances in medical and psychological science that would occur forty years in the future is either naïve or malicious. It should be noted, by comparison, that the GDR had a much more open and positive policy with respect to homosexuality‘.

There have been NO advances whatsoever in medical science which discredit the soviet and Marxist view of human sexuality. In fact, all the scientific evidence supports that view.

The founding fathers of modern psychology, Jung, Freud and Adler all characterised homosexuality as a perversion. Adler believed that the cause was an inferiority complex in early childhood.

Recent studies in epigenetics and urnings confirm rather than negate the soviet view of sexuality. For decades the research of soviet scientist Trofym Lysenko have been dismissed as rubbish by the Western scientific establishment. Now scientists are admitting that Lysenko was right.

Total freedom of expression for scientific theories is a value of socialist societies because knowledge empowers the people. In capitalist societies,however, knowledge serves the power of capitalists. That is why the Rockefeller family and George Soros are promoting everything that promotes alienation, social fragmentation and sexual perversion – the values of the ruling elite and the tools by which they keep the working class in total submission to the capitalist mode of production.

To suggest, as the Stalin Society of North America has done, that today all communists should support the LGBT movement is utter nonsense. Instead, communists should be promoting the work of NARTH and researching soviet methods of rehabilitating the emotional disorder referred to as homosexuality. Thousands of child-abuse victims and adolescents suffering from homosexuality are not being given the compassionate care and therapy they need. Instead, they are being told the lie that they are ‘born gay’ and cannot recover from their condition.

The Soviets did extraordinary research in all areas of science. But sexology was not a priority during the Stalin period. Soviet workers knew that the natural sexual relation was between man and woman and, as science was a public service serving the majority and not a privileged minority, Soviet workers did not want to waste time in useless bourgeois domains of research.

The Great Soviet Encyclopedia of 1930 states:

‘Soviet legislation does not recognize so-called crimes against morality. Our laws proceed from the principle of protection of society and therefore countenance punishment only in those instances when juveniles and minors are the objects of homosexual interest … while recognizing the incorrectness of homosexual development … our society combines prophylactic and other therapeutic measures with all the necessary conditions for making the conflicts that afflict homosexuals as painless as possible and for resolving their typical estrangement from society within the collective’
—Sereisky, Great Soviet Encyclopedia, 1930, p. 593

The Stalin Society of North America claims that article 121 of the Soviet Penal Code criminalizing homosexuality was only enforced in cases of pedophilia with up to 1000 prosecutions annually. This ignores the fact that the Soviet view, following Engels, saw a strong correlation between male homosexuality and pederasty. This is also the view of the Russian Federation today.

The word gulag has come to symbolise the punitive and oppressive nature of Soviet society. Nothing could be further from the truth. In his book ‘Stalin: Man of Contradiction’ Ken Cameron writes:

‘In the 1930s, as we have seen, the spread of industrialization and collectivization brought about a socialist state with a broad spectrum of social and political rights. As we would expect from such a state, the legal and prison systems that it established were essentially just and nonpunitive. In fact, they were praised and admired by liberal attorneys and penologists throughout the world. People’s courts, in which ordinary citizens sat with a professional judge on the bench, tried 80 percent of all cases, and legal services could be obtained free of charge. As a desirable alternative to prisons, “agricultural and industrial labor colonies” were established where some prisoners brought their families and where they were allowed to marry. The basic objective of the system was rehabilitation, not just in words, as in capitalist states, but in reality, as was dramatically shown, for instance, in the film Road to Life, depicting the regeneration of teenage criminals. One of the most extensive industrial camp projects was the building of the Baltic-White Sea Canal by prisoners, a vast enterprise whose three chief engineers were former “wreckers.” At the completion of the project, 300 prisoners received scholarships, 12,000 were freed, and 59,000 had their sentences reduced. Such was the normal course of working class justice in the USSR. Therefore, if changes were made in some aspects of the system, there must have been reasons for it. ‘

The Stalin Society of North America refers apologetically to the German Democratic Republic’s tolerance of homosexuality, claiming that this was due to the GDR being more ‘advanced’. This is nonsense. The GDR never pursued a Marxist-Leninist line.

In fact, they opposed the policies of socialist construction advocated by Moscow and proceeded to build a multi-party bourgeois republic, adopting Masonic symbols in their national flag, mocking the working class, while claiming to be socialist. In fact, Eric Honecker himself admitted in 1972 that the GDR was not socialist.

Marxist-Leninists in East Germany were brutally repressed by state security. The GDR was certainly more ‘advanced’, advanced in capitalism, hence the tolerance for homosexuality.

The Soviet view of human sexuality was correct and only social democrats and anti-Marxists would oppose it.

The Meaning of Orlando

The Orlando massacre served two purposes: 1 To promote gun-control, thus preventing armed revolt by the U.S. proletariat against the oligarchic state. 2 To promote the idea that Muslims are backward, dangerous and ‘anti-gay’. The point is to reinforce the Zionist agenda of a ‘clash of civilisations’ whereby barbaric Islamists are attempting to ‘take away our freedoms’ and subvert our values of tolerance and human rights. But it is the ruling class which is attempting to take away our freedoms, not some external enemy.

The truth is that the Islamic State is an creation and instrument of the US/Israeli military-industrial complex. It is an army of mercenaries, trained and funded by NATO and the Gulf Cooperation Council against the people of the Middle East in accordance with U.S./Israeli geopolitical interests. It was not surprising to see that one of the first major media disinformation campaigns against Syria in 2011 involved the lies of a a Syrian Lesbian blogger who was exposed as a CIA agent.

Those who are against the demonisation of Muslims should recognise that the views of the Syrian Arab Republic and the Islamic Republic of Iran on sexuality are correct, progressive and a strong reflection of the anti-imperialist ethos of both states.

No one can call himself a communist and support the reactionary LGBT movement. There will be no rainbow flags in a socialist state but the red banner of the proletariat!